[Below, you'll find the live stream video of the midweek Lenten worship service of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio for March 30 and the prepared message for the service. I hope God blesses you through His Word here.]
Tonight, two themes will take our attention: the sign of Jonah and God’s call to a life of change. Jonah is the only Old Testament prophet to whom Jesus compares Himself. Jesus was and is both God and human. Jesus is sinless. Jonah, by contrast, was a sinful man. When God called Jonah to rise and speak God’s Word to the Ninevites in the kingdom of Assyria, he ran in the opposite direction. When God the Father sent Jesus to die for our sins, Jesus was “obedient to death—even death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:8) It would be hard to find an Old Testament prophet less like Jesus than Jonah. Yet when a Pharisee asks Jesus to show a sign of His deity, Jesus says, “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” (Matthew 12:39-40) What is “the sign of the prophet Jonah” exactly? Jesus’ resurrection is one part of the sign of Jonah. But so is death. Jonah prays to God in tonight’s lesson: “From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help…” (Jonah 2:2) In the belly of the fish, Jonah was at first, as good as dead, with no reason to think he could survive such an ordeal. And, Jonah was as good as dead because he had sinned against God. “The wages of sin is death.” Like Jonah, Jesus has died for sin. The difference is that while Jonah would symbolically die before symbolically rising from the belly of the fish for his own sin, Jesus would actually die before actually rising from the dead for oursin. As 2 Corinthians 5:21 says of Jesus: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” God has gone to the lengths of enduring death itself to reach us with His forgiving love. Do you want to see what God is like and how much He loves you? Look at His death, when like Jonah, buried in the depths of the sea, God the Son lay dead in a tomb for your sin. This is the sign of Jonah that Jesus gives to us. In our reading from Jonah tonight, we see that God didn’t give up on Jonah or on the people of Nineveh. He wanted to call them to repentance and faith in Him. In the belly of the fish, Jonah repents for his rebellion against God and “the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.” (Jonah 2:10) God delivers Jonah from death for a reason. Jesus has also delivered you and me from sin, death, and eternal separation from God for a reason. 1 Peter tells baptized believers in Christ: “you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession.” Those are blessed things to be; but then Peter tells us why God, through Christ, makes us a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession.” It’s this: “...that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” (1 Peter 2:10) Faith shared, grows; faith unshared is stuck in perpetual immaturity, likely as not to die. God saved Jonah from death in the deep not just to save Jonah, but also so that Jonah could take life with God to others. In Christ, God has saved you and me to do the very same thing in our world and in our time, not as an obligation, but as a joyous privilege. And so, saved from death in the deep, Jonah becomes the only prophet in the Old Testament that God calls (or has to call) twice. God once more tells Jonah: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.” (Jonah 3:2) God doesn’t say, “All right, Jonah, go to Nineveh and get it right this time.” When God forgives our sins, it’s as if they never happened. Forgiving Jonah, God again sends the prophet on his mission to the Ninevites. Over the course of several days, Jonah delivers God’s message to the Ninevites: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” (Jonah 3:4.) The original Hebrew in which Jonah is written literally says, “Forty days yet and Nineveh shall be neh·pā·ḵeṯ.” That last word can be translated as overturned. But it can also be rendered as changed. God’s message to the Ninevites was, “In forty days, CHANGE is coming!” This isn’t much different from our message as Christians to the world, “When Jesus comes back, things are going to change. We can be on the right side of that change with Jesus or we can be on the wrong side of the change against Jesus.” The Word of God that comes to the Ninevites through Jonah is both Law and Promise. The Law says, “God condemns your sin and without repentance, you won’t like the changes coming.” The Promise, like the Gospel that comes us through Jesus, tells the Ninevites, “When you repent and believe in God, there will be a change in your relationship with God. And when you believe in God, He will set out to change you to be more like Him.” In ancient Israel’s history, God had sent prophets to His own people, the Jews, and their calls for repentance and faith were often rejected, the prophets killed. But: “The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth.” (Jonah 4:5) Later, the king himself will repent and believe in God and say, “Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.” (Jonah 3:5) The trusting attitude of the Ninevites is remarkable! They repent and believe in God. They accept that God is entitled to bring any changes to their lives He wants. Change, in fact, is the essence of the life of faith in God. When we live in daily repentance and renewal, we accept that God is likely going to make changes in our daily lives. He’s going to call us to do things we don’t want to do, to change the ways we think about other people. We will either curse the changes that God brings to us, as Jonah did when God wanted him to change from being a prophet just to his own people and to reach out in love to people he hated as well, or we will embrace God and trust Him through all the changes that He calls us to make in our lives. Friends of ours had a negative view of people who came to America from other countries. But when God called them to help their local church teach English to immigrants who spoke Spanish and Arabic, they didn’t run in the other direction like Jonah. They embraced the call God placed on their lives. It meant changes in their lives. Big changes. But it has also brought them the joy that always belongs to those who are open to the changes God wants to bring to our lives. How is God calling you to change your life tonight? The Ninevites trusted in God. “When God saw what [the Ninevites] did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened,” Jonah 3:10 tells us. God loves to destroy our old sinful ways of thinking and living and forgive us, then sets us free to live out the lives He is daily changing, to face the new callings He sets before us each day. While the repentance, faith, and life of God-driven change we see in the Ninevites inspire us, Jonah presents a different story. More on that as we conclude our series next week.
[This message was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, earlier today.] Luke 12:49-56 During the recent Lutheran Week in Indianapolis, I tried to eat a sandwich made with the kind of crumbly, disintegrating bread that used to give gluten-free a bad name. After lunch, Wayne asked me about the diet I had to keep in light of Celiac Disease and a heart attack I had nine years ago. As we rode down an escalator, I told him, “You know, some days I can’t wait to be with Jesus in eternity, partly because I’ll be able to eat whole wheat bread and run and play baseball again.” Some people near us on the escalator giggled when they heard me say that. And it is funny. I chuckled too. But don’t all Christians sometimes fantasize about the things we’ll do in eternity with Jesus once we’re free of the constraints of sin, death, and darkness that pervade this life? But there’s a danger to our lives as Christians in focusing too much on eternity:It may cause us to ignore what Jesus calls the crisis of living each day in this world, in this life, as followers of Jesus Christ. We can get so accustomed to thinking that Jesus is on our sides, taking Him and the free gift of eternal life with God He gives to all who believe in Him, for granted, and thus, feeling free to do, say, and live any way we decide to. Listen: Jesus has not set us free from sin and death so that we can ignore His will. He has not set us free from sin and death so that we can ignore the needs of our neighbors or the injustice, bigotry, or hatred with which the world treats them. Jesus has not set us free from sin and death so that we can view our church membership as a get-out-of-hell pass while ignoring the need our neighbors have for Jesus’ salvation, ignoring that about a quarter or more of our neighbors have zero religious belief. This means that every day a Christian lives on this earth faces a crisis. I’m using that word as Jesus does in John 12:31, where He says, “Now is the time for judgment on this world,” which is more literally translated from the Greek in which all the New Testament writers originally composed their books: “Now is the crisis [κρίσις]of this world.” Here, Jesus is saying that, in this life, in each moment of this life, you and I deal with a decision point, a moment when we must make a judgment. And the judgment we must make is this:
Will we turn to Jesus or will we turn away from Him?
Will we turn to the world, to what’s easy, to what’s socially acceptable, to what’s safe, to what’s advantageous to us if heedless of the needs of my neighbor, to go along to get along or will we turn in repentance and faith to Jesus?
Our gospel lesson for this morning, Luke 12:49-56, finds Jesus turning abruptly from answering questions about the end of earth’s days after which all who have trusted in Him will live in His fully perfected kingdom, to the crisis the confronts us each day: the judgment you and I must make as to whether in this moment--at work, in our relationships, at home, in the world--we will turn to Jesus and live or walk away from Jesus and experience death. Take a look at our lesson, please. Jesus begins: “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” These words don’t fit with the world’s usual image of Jesus, the Jesus of the sentimentalists who think Jesus was a wonderful guy, but not someone they have to answer to. Fire, an image that Jesus and the early Church used in talking about the Holy Spirit, is a symbol of judgment and of cleansing. Jesus, to be sure, has come into the world to bring salvation and peace with God to all who believe in Him. But He has also come to singe us in the purifying flames of God’s judgment, to burn away all that’s evil, unwholesome, and unloving, in order to refine us like precious metals, separating us from sin and death. To truly trust in Jesus begins with truly understanding, daily, that we are sinners who need to confess our sin, divesting ourselves of our addiction to sin. Then, purged of death and darkness, we can rise to newness of life. This is what happens to us in Holy Baptism: first, our old selves are drowned, then our new selves, God’s brand new creatures, rise. Because the old self still lurks until the days of our physical deaths and resurrections, the Christian life is composed of returning each day to the Lord of the baptismal font for this same death and resurrection to happen again and again. Romans 6:4 reminds us, “We were therefore buried with [Jesus Christ] through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.” This new life is what God wants to give to all people through faith in Jesus every single day! Then Jesus says: “But I have a baptism to undergo, and what constraint I am under until it is completed!” Jesus wants to bring each person who hears His name to the crisis point to which we all need to come in order to receive Him and the life that only He can give to us. But before that could happen, Jesus had to undergo the baptism of death on a cross. His mission on earth would only be fulfilled when He did this and could say, “It is finished.” On the cross, Jesus shares the death that belongs to every human being from the moment we are born: the death of separation from the One Who gives life. It was from this place of separation that Jesus cried from the cross, “My God! My God! Why have You forsaken me.” But because God the Father raised Jesus from the dead, in the waters of Baptism, we share in Jesus’ death so that the Father too, can raise those who trust themselves and their whole lives to Jesus. It was to accomplish this for you and me that Jesus couldn’t wait--He felt constrained to go to the cross, set His face for Jerusalem--that Jesus went to the cross. Jesus then says: “Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.” In this life, anyone who dares to follow Jesus, who daily turns to Jesus to seek the death of their old selves and the creation of their new selves, who live in what we Lutherans call “daily repentance and renewal” can expect that even members of our own families will turn against us. Or that, at any rate, they won’t understand us. Likely, everyone here has taken shots for following Jesus from someone in their family: siblings, cousins, parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren. Or, they have experienced not being understood. I know that I have. It’s just part of following Jesus. At this point in our lesson, Jesus addresses the end of this world when He will return to judge the living and the dead in light of how we address the crisis--the judgment points--we face every day. “He said to the crowd: ‘When you see a cloud rising in the west, immediately you say, “It’s going to rain,” and it does. And when the south wind blows, you say, “It’s going to be hot,” and it is. Hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky. How is it that you don’t know how to interpret this present time?'” Where Jesus lived in the first century AD, if people saw clouds in the west, they knew that rain was coming in from the Mediterranean and if they felt hot winds coming from the Negev to the south, they knew were in for a heatwave. People knew how to read those meteorological signs. But here is Jesus, God the Son, standing right in front of these people, His identity as God and Savior repeatedly confirmed by miracles, signs, and wonders, by His words, by His compassion, by His sinlessness, yet they ignore all these signs. They don’t see that they need to turn to Jesus now and believe in Him. It’s as though they’re holding out for more proof, which will soon come in His death and resurrection, though most of the crowds who thronged to Jesus during His life on earth would never believe in Him even after He rose from the dead. It’s as though too, the crowd is waiting for a better offer. “Maybe,” they seem to think, “we can follow Jesus, but from a distance, getting just enough of Him to get the blessings He offers, but not close enough to actually have to give up the old sins we love so much, not close enough to actually hear Him call us to a life of love of God and love of neighbor, of worship and prayer, of witness to others for Jesus. Maybe we can have Jesus without being changed by Him, without being His disciple.” Folks, it doesn’t work like that. As you’ve heard me say before (and as I need to be constantly reminded myself): We will either have all of Jesus or we will have none of Jesus at all. I’m guessing that the hesitation of the crowd surrounding Jesus that day is no different from the hesitation felt by most people in most churches in North America. They don’t perceive the crisis of each moment, the need to turn to Jesus for life and forgiveness right nowin every right now of life because life in this world can end in the blink of an eye and then there will be no more opportunity to turn to Jesus and live. It’s because of this hesitation in the churches of the US, Canada, and Europe that,
Christians in America have largely lost their sense of urgency about being and making disciples--about turning to Jesus and inviting others, despite the possibility of rejection, to turn to Jesus too. We have forgotten the moment to moment crisis that is the permanent state of being in this fallen world. But Jesus’ call is still urgent, folks. He says: “The time has come...The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” There isn’t a better moment to follow Jesus than right now, in this moment in which God allows you to live on this earth. There isn’t a better moment to share Jesus with others than right now on this earth. Because Jesus saves us by grace through faith in Christ alone, may this always be our prayer:
Jesus, what do you want me to do or say, who do you want me to listen to, pray for, or serve right now?
And then may we do what He calls us to. We don’t have to wait for a perfect time to live in the freedom Jesus gives to His disciples. In the crisis moments--the decision points--of each day, may we always turn to Jesus. Amen [I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Luke 13:31-35 At the end of last Sunday’s gospel lesson, which recounted Jesus being tempted by the devil in the wilderness, we were told, “When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time (Luke 4:13).” Today’s gospel lesson, Luke 13:31-35, tells about one of the times the devil deemed “opportune” for tempting Jesus away from His mission of saving us. Here, the devil uses at least one human being, a corrupt and murderous king focused on neither God or faith in God, focused instead on fear and evil, to tempt Jesus. Jesus has been teaching, casting out demons, and healing the sick in Galilee, when Luke tells us, “At that time some Pharisees came to Jesus and said to him, ‘Leave this place and go somewhere else. Herod wants to kill you.’” (Luke 13:31) Students of the New Testament aren’t sure about the motives of this particular group of Pharisees. The Pharisees, as you know, were a sect of Judaism, who believed in a more literal interpretation of the Old Testament, a strict adherence to Old Testament law, and the resurrection of the dead. Although Jesus had run-ins with many of the Pharisees, their views were closer to those Jesus taught than were those of the Sadducees. The Pharisees weren't altogether bad, as they're sometimes stereotyped to be. The apostle Paul, for example, described himself as a Pharisee all his life, though he followed Christ and offended many Pharisees by insisting that human beings cannot make themselves acceptable to God by fulfilling God’s law, but only by entrusting our lives by faith in Jesus (Acts 23:6; Romans 3:21-26). The Pharisees here then, could have wanted to frighten Jesus, maybe even have been working with Herod. Or they may have had genuine concern for Jesus. We don’t know. But we do know what they tell Jesus: “Herod wants to kill you.” Now, this is not the same Herod who was king when Jesus was born. That Herod, Herod the Great, was a thug put on the throne by the Romans who already had conquered the Jews and found it convenient to have local puppets, with some power, to make their rule a bit more acceptable to the conquered people. When Herod the Great died, his “kingdom” was split into smaller areas overseen by Herod’s sons, who were also thugs. (It was a family thing. Can you imagine what Thanksgivings were like with that brood?) The Herod in our gospel lesson today ruled over Galilee, the region in which Jesus grew up. Herod kept a palace in Jerusalem, where one of this brothers was the local puppet king, presumably so that he could suck up to the Roman governor, at this time Pilate, and make sure his brothers didn’t get an advantage over him. This is the Herod who beheaded John the Baptist. Although he expressed an interest in watching Jesus perform a miracle, he also wouldn’t have hesitated to have Jesus killed if he thought Jesus posed a threat to him. The Herods were all murderous goons like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Bashar al-Assad, and Mohammed bin Salman today. What would we do if we lived in Russia, North Korea, Syria, or Saudi Arabia and learned that the thugs ruling those countries wanted to kill us? Speaking for myself, I would be tempted to save my life by running the other way. But, Jesus didn’t come into this world to save Himself; He came into this world to save you and me from sin, death, darkness, and futility by dying on the cross at a day and time of God’s choosing. The preacher in Hebrews says of Jesus, “For the joy set before him [that is, the joy of having us live in God’s eternal kingdom] he endured the cross, scorning its shame...” (Hebrews 12:2) The devil was using the Pharisees to tempt Jesus from going to the cross for you and me. “Stay away from Jerusalem,” the devil was telling Jesus through the Pharisees. “Don’t make waves and you won’t get hurt.” But Jesus came to “seek and save” those lost in sin and death (Luke 19:10) and was resolutely headed for Jerusalem and death on a cross for us (Luke 9:51), whether the devil, the Pharisees, or anyone else wanted it to happen or not! Jesus would not be deterred from giving His fulfilling His for you and me! We must not be deterred from following Him! And so we’re told in verses 32 and 33: “He [Jesus] replied, ‘Go tell that fox, “I will keep on driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal. In any case, I must press on today and tomorrow and the next day—for surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem!”’” God’s book, the Bible, of course, teaches that God is the one who establishes governments and that Christians are to be respectful of governments and prayerful for leaders. God instituted government because most people will not voluntarily accede to Christ's Lordship over their lives. Without governments, Martin Luther said, Christians would live in this world as lambs among ravenous wolves. But the Bible also teaches that we are to stand against anyone, including leaders, when they try to thwart the will of God.
If governments or leaders ask us to be part of something we know is against God’s will, it’s our obligation as disciples of Jesus to follow Christ and not the government. Paul writes in Romans, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” (Romans 12:2) Jesus refers to Herod as “that fox.” In Jesus’ time, foxes were seen as dangerous and evil, but not very bright. This is how Jesus sees Herod. “You tell that fox that I will keep doing my mission no matter if He thinks He can kill me off,” Jesus is saying. The phrase “today and tomorrow and on a third day” which Jesus uses here was a common Aramaic expression. It meant that Jesus was going to do what He came to the world to accomplish. But it’s also not hard to see in the words “the third day,” Jesus’ promise that when He was raised from the dead on Easter Sunday, it would be confirmation of the victory for us that He won on Good Friday! Now, Jesus shifts gears. He thinks of Jerusalem. Verse 34: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.” Jesus’ repetition of, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem” was a common way to express sorrow. When my great-grandmother lay dying, she looked above her and called the name of a then-deceased brother who had loved Jesus. She then turned her head downward and said the name of a relative who had refused to follow Jesus. “John, John,” she said with sorrow in her voice as she shook her head. In our lesson, Jesus is lamenting the fact that because of Jerusalem’s hardness of heart, it had repeatedly refused the protection of God from sin, death, and the devil. Jesus would have gladly protected Jerusalem from the foxes--the devil and his earthly co-conspirators, the Herods--and acted as a mother hen protecting her brood. But Jerusalem and God's people generally, had repeatedly chosen to go their own way (Isaiah 53:6; Acts 1:25). Listen: Jesus wants to shelter you, your family, our congregation, our nation, and our world from the evil one. I am convinced that if more Christians would run to take shelter in Jesus, if we would intentionally pray that our families, churches, and nations would come under Jesus’ lordship, and if we were bold and unapologetic in our witness for Christ, we would experience what the Bible calls “the peace of God, which transcends all understandings…” (Philippians 4:7). That doesn’t mean that all our troubles will disappear. That will have to wait until we, like our Savior Jesus, have been raised from death to live in eternity with Him. But, in the power of Jesus, we can handle all that this world, its Herods, and the devil himself might throw at us. Under Jesus’ protective wings, we are “more than conquerors” and we belong to Him now and forever! Verse 35: “[Jesus says] ‘Look, your house is left to you desolate. I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’” Here Jesus looks ahead to future events which, as God in the flesh, He sees with clarity.
First, He points to 70 AD, some four decades later, when His people will be decisively put down, the Temple destroyed, many people massacred. This would happen because Jesus’ fellow Jews refused to take shelter under His arms and instead took hope in armed rebellion against the Romans, in their own thinking. When we put our hope in anyone or anything other than the God revealed in Jesus Christ, we sow our own eternal destruction.
Second, Jesus points to Palm Sunday when He will be welcomed into Jerusalem with the words of Psalm 118:26. Jesus is telling the Pharisees that, unless they want to hang out with Him, He’s going to keep at His mission on earth and they won’t see Him until Palm Sunday when He comes to complete it.
For those of us who are baptized and who confess Jesus as God and Savior, it can be tempting to cave into the temptations to go along and get along:
to not speak the name of Jesus to others who don’t know Him and need Him as much as we do,
to not give of ourselves without thought of reward or recognition,
to not love God to love neighbor as we love ourselves,
to not love fellow believers sacrificially,
to give into the fear incited in us by the devil and this world’s foxes.
But we follow a risen Savior Who has conquered everything that causes us fear. He was not bowed by Herod or the devil or death. And He’s still in business, still alive, still loving us. So, we need not fear:
to speak His name to those who need Him
to give of ourselves without thought of reward
to love God and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves
to love fellow believers sacrificially
to take courage in Christ's name by the power of the Holy Spirit in all circumstances.
“As for God,” Psalm 18:30 tells us, “his way is perfect: The LORD's word is flawless; he shields all who take refuge in him.” You can trust in that! [I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
